Assessing the impact of interaction design on user experience in cross-platform VR games

一家公司在游戏行业的成功取决于其吸引大量用户社区的能力。对于那些寻求在日益庞大和多样化的市场中获得知名度和赞誉的小型工作室来说尤其如此，这将推动他们开发出新颖的游戏体验。这一理念以及在玩家交互设计、叙事和艺术指导等领域进行创新的理念尤其适用于独立开发者，因为他们通常拥有更大的灵活性和创造性自由。除了设计之外，另一个创新前沿便是使用先进的技术去创造全新的游戏体验。在使用新技术（例如新的交互模式）时，必须注意保持用户交互的质量和功能，以提供积极的用户体验（UX）。这是我们的合作伙伴机构Stitch Media（一家在伦敦、安大略和多伦多设有办事处的游戏工作室）目前面临的研究挑战。Stitch目前正在开发《Broken Spectre》，这是一款跨越虚拟现实（VR）和移动设备的跨平台游戏，可以在两个平台之间无缝体验。本研究项目旨在探索在VR游戏中设计和实现交互技术的知识差距，并了解是什么使这些交互成功。另外还要关注如何设计这些交互以支持与移动设备的跨平台兼容性。在这个空间中设计交互方案是非常复杂的，因为硬件设计缺乏标准化，并且在虚拟世界中寻找周围的核心交互与传统平台有很大不同。因此，VR的交互设计领域充满了挑战，也是游戏开发者特别感兴趣的领域。通过研究VR交互如何实现无数预期的游戏玩法和叙事目标，该项目将为VR中的各种核心交互设计技术提供实用指南，为游戏开发者提供与常见游戏玩法模式相关的游戏交互设计功能方法。

A company's success in the game industry is contingent on its ability to attract a significant user community. This is especially true for small studios seeking to gain name recognition and acclaim within an increasingly large and diverse marketplace, fueling an impetus to develop novel gameplay experiences. This notion, and the idea of innovating in areas like player interaction design, narrative, and art direction, is particularly relevant to indie developers, since they often have great agility and creative freedom. Besides design, another frontier of innovation is using advances in technology to pioneer new gameplay experiences. When working with new technologies, such as novel interaction modalities, care must be taken in preserving the quality and functionality of user interaction to deliver positive user experience (UX). This is the current research challenge for our partner organization, Stitch Media, a game studio with offices in London, Ontario and Toronto. Stitch is currently in the process of developing Broken Spectre, a cross-platform title spanning virtual reality (VR) and mobile devices, featuring seamless play between the two platforms. This research project aims to explore the knowledge gap in designing and implementing interaction techniques in VR titles, and understanding what makes these interactions successful. With an additional focus on how these interactions can be designed to support cross-platform compatibility with mobile devices. Designing interaction schemes within this space is notoriously complex, as there is a lack of standardization in hardware design, and core interactions such as looking around in the virtual world are vastly different to traditional platforms. Consequently, the area of interaction design for VR is wrought with challenge, and an area of exceptional interest for game developers. By investigating how VR interactions can achieve a myriad of intended gameplay and narrative goals, this project will provide a practical guideline for various core interaction design techniques in VR, offering game developers a functional approach to game interaction design relating to common gameplay patterns.